I'm having troubles with my new Gentoo setup. I have a Samsung 5400rpm drive. I know for a fact it is ATA100 with DMA ability. In the BIOS I have it set for PIO mode 4 and DMA mode 5.

When I do something like:

Code:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

It tells me the old "Not available". (And yes, of course I'm doing this from root )

My motherboard is an MSI KT3Ultra2. It has the VIA8235 chipset. I did a kernel recompile last night with the VIA8xxxx options, but I still cannot set DMA. I think this would be a major detriment to my system performance? It is not terribly slow at the moment, but speedups are always welcomed.

Which, I think, basically proves my thoughts that the transfer rates we're seeing in hdparm are going to max-out at the avg sustained transfer rate of the disk, which is the theoretical transfer rate, minus some overhead. From my math, it seems there's about a 25-30% overhead, so the realistic max's are about 70-75% of the internal transfer rates for the drives.

So for my laptop, with it's 240-333Mb/s internal transfer rate, I shouldn't expect more than 22-29MB/sec of measure transfer rates. And it falls right into that at 22-26, depending on lots of stuff.

Of course, this only is for sustained reads. Any kind of burst traffic is likely to be much faster, but if the read-ahead buffer can't cope with it, it'll fall back to seeks and reads.

Which again seems to imply that you want rpms for low seek times, and high internal transfer rates to get it over the wire, and your interface to the system is much, much less important than your HD's internal capabilities are.

Since DMA is disabled, and you can't seem to enable it, it's probably a chipset issue. Latest kernel sources and sure that you've included the right chipset support? Some of the chipsets were, IIRC, blacklisted for bad behavior, or perhaps it was drives... So that might be an issue

Next, make sure that you're actually using your newly built kernel (mounted boot before you copied it over?).

And also go through the output to dmesg. I'm sure there's something in there that's explaining why dma is being disabled.

The performance differs dramaticly, but i do not understand why because the drives are almost identical, they are setup the same in bios. HDA is primary master, and HDB is primary slave, on the same cable.

I do not know how to solve this problem, ofcourse i've tried disabling dma, enabling dma and so forth. No good there. I also have the correct chipset compiled directly into the kernel. (2.6.3). I recently upgraded to kernel 2.3.6 from 2.6.0 in an attempt to get rid of this problem but it didnt help.

Try making the two HDs both masters (hda and hdc, and the other two drives as slaves (assuming these are opticals?)

Does that get you anything? Seems like it's not a cabling issue, unless the master drive doesn't like the cabling or the master-slave-cs option.

Another thing to try is to swap the drives, and see how that changes things.

And yes, you'll be mucking with Grub and fstab to do all the drive swapping.

Normally it's considered good practice to put to the two fast drives on separate channels so that they don't compete with each other for bandwidth on it.

If you have a liveCD, can you boot from that? And if so, different or the same results? It also might help to do the swapping around when using the livecd, so you don't need to much with grub and fstab to keep everything sane.

Ok, first thing first. My drive i had problems with works fine now. What i did was to take that particular drive, put it in another gentoo based computer, i ran the hdparm benchmark again, and i got the same lousy results. At that part i started to believe that the drives controllerboard was fried or something. Anyway.

I took the drive back into the original computer again, blowed away all partitions, made new ones. Made an ext3 filesystem, and after that ran some benchmarks again. And lookie... the speed is up to around 30MB / sec again.

I dunno what the problem was....but apparently a reformatted harddrive solved my particular problem... i guess the partition table was farked up somehow, we have had some powercuts here....could be related to that i presume.

don't waste your $$ for the SATA - drive, it'll give
you nothing more. Your ATA drives performance is
just great and you would not get any better values
using a SATA drive.

The most important feature of having a SATA - bus
system would be that you could have a bigger number
of disks in your system than with using simple ATA.
And the performance gain is simpy too small to pay extra money for._________________neoCortex maddin # uname -a
Linux neoCortex 2.6.14-gentoo-r5 #2 SMP Fri Jan 13 04:40:02 CET 2006 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

i think you should be able to get at least
about 40 ~ 50 Mb/s out of your current P-ATA disk,
depending a bit on how big the buffer of your device
is and how fast it spins. ( and depending on your
m/b's chipset, if you've select kernel support for your one etc .. )

No improvements. It seems that this controller n-force IDE has a very bad driver because another user as commented me that the same PATA hd connected to S-ATA throught a pata-2-sata converter runs faster than in PATA.

If you don't know any other tip or trick, this night I'll be testing if that SATA driver is better and report.

So perhaps you're getting the best you're going to get from it. Do an hdparm -I on each drive (yours and your friends that's faster) and see if the firmware is different, or anything else. Could be something like that.

That's probably 33MB/sec, not 33mb/sec. And it's probably as fast as the drive itself can read off the platters. And there's no way to make that faster. It's within spec per seagate (see above comments).

Looks like it's faster to the tune of 32%. And this seems to be held up by the numbers we're seeing here. 30% faster than 40MB/sec is 52MB/sec. So it seems like you should be able to get up to at least 40 or so... But probably not beyond that. I wonder what the bottle-neck on your system is.

SATA have more bandwidth available per channel(and only one device per channel), allowing for faster disks. But ATM it seem that most SATA disks are exact replicas of IDE disk just with a evolved interface. The faster disk will come though, WD have already introduced a 10K-RPM RAPTOR line that reads about 70MB/s(which is faster than any ATA100/133 disk available, that I know of anyways ).

Also, one of the "big deals" about SATA is that it makes better use of the PCI bus with its serial nature. Allowing for 150Mb/sec transfers per channel/port, which makes it a good choice for RAID solutions with a lot of fast (+60MB/sec) disk is connected.

But is SATA "worth it"? Dunno really, depends on what you'll use it for. If you just need a new disk with good performance, there isn't much difference between the average SATA disk and the average ATA disk. Though, if you want to stripe more than two disks delivering ~60MB/Sec the SATA solution would probably be the best(non-scsi) way to go.

Me personally, went with a Maxtor SATA drive when i made my current system, mostly because the motherboard i had bought for it had these 4 SATA port with nothing connected to them. Since there was already a burner attached to one of the ATA133 channels, I felt that the SATA ports needed a device the most(also, SATA cables are cool lookin')

Since I only got one hard-drive in the box, I most likely wouldn't be able to notice any differences in speed as opposed to a ATA133 model of the drive. Which this head-2-head between two "identical" Maxtor drives with different interfaces clearly shows, the ATA133 is even a bit faster is some of the benchmarks. But the difference is tiny. If you try and throw a WD Raptor in to the Head-2-head, you'll get a hint of what the "future" is like for SATA. Then throw in a couple of SCSI320 models, and you got a pretty good overview what the different interfaces offer/are-good-at ATM. Its also clear from this that transfer speeds isn't everything, the 10K scsi drive transfers less data than the 10K SATA, but is a faster in 9/10 of the server benchmarks.

Of-course more disks like the Raptor will come be introduced, which utilizes more of the SATA bandwidth. Making SATA show its advantages over ATA133 more clearly in disk-2-disk comparisons.

Try looking around storagereview.com(its a good resource), compare some drives and see the results and figure out what drive(SATA, ATA or SCSI) fits ur need the best.

but i got a strange problem, when im moving a file from hdb to any other drive i only get around 2-4mB/s. when im moving from hdd/hda to hdb i get around 30-45mB/s and when i moving a file from hdd to hda or otherway around i also get the full speed. so any ideas to fix the speed problem on hdb?